Michelle Duke
I'm a Content Producer working in tech & innovation. Known as the “Hackathon Queen” 👑 I'm on the GitHub DevRel team and love sharing stories from our amazing community of developers.
Hackatoberfest, hackathons, and open source contributions. It’s been a hectic month with so many community pull requests to all kinds of projects. So many in fact that we had to…
Hackatoberfest, hackathons, and open source contributions. It’s been a hectic month with so many community pull requests to all kinds of projects. So many in fact that we had to spend hours going through all the submissions for this blog post. We almost didn’t get it out before the end of October. Nevertheless, we are here with our top staff picks for projects that shipped a major release. Read up on the projects and their breaking changes, and maybe contribute during the last few Hacktoberfest days.
One of my favourite open source projects is Home Assistant. It allows you to control any smart device in your home. As a tech enthusiast, you can imagine how many WiFi enabled products I have in my house! The new Home Assistant OS is here, version 9. It comes with the latest Linux release and includes faster boot times, USB support, updated firmware, improved Bluetooth/WiFi support, and lots more. Read all the detailed changes in the release notes.
I’m going to mention Hacktoberfest several times during this post, and Appwrite is another reason. They sponsored Hacktoberfest last year and this year and now have released their version 1.0 🥳 . Appwrite is a secure backend server for web, mobile, and Flutter developers. It’s a Firebase alternative and comes with a tonne of beautiful colours and aesthetics—just ask the developers who got custom SWAG last Hacktoberfest! Congrats to the team on shipping the first major version. If you want to contribute to their Hacktoberfest projects, check out their good-first-issues.
🥁 The wait is finally over 🥁
Appwrite 1.0 is now LIVE! 🥳
Packed with a ton of exciting features, 1.0 is the BEST Appwrite version to date & we couldn't have done it without YOU! 🤗
🔗 What's next? Future plans? Learn more https://t.co/Au1weyQQDl pic.twitter.com/EQyZweVy3G
— Appwrite (@appwrite) September 14, 2022
Ever wanted to look back on your GitHub repository to the way it once was? Well now you can. Git Story is a wayback time machine for showing you a snapshot of your project from a before time. It’s powered by the GitHub API and has an interactive calendar to choose from. You can scan commits and explore how a project once looked. It’s like “Back to the Future”, except you can only view a project, not change the timeline! Congrats to Git Story on shipping the first major version 🥳.
We’ve featured RxDB in the Release Radar before, and now they’re back with version 13. Short for Reactive Database, RxDB is an offline-first, NoSQL database for JavaScript applications, including websites, electron, Node.js, and progressive web apps. The new version brings a faster replication protocol, new storage implementation, a web socket replication plugin, and lots more changes. Check out all the updates in the release notes.
Short for Medical Open Network for AI, MONAI is a Py-Torch based framework for deep learning specific to the healthcare imaging industry. Academics, professionals, and clinical researchers are using this state of the art workflow for pre-processing, evaluation metrics, and more. This all helps for quicker and more accurate diagnostics. Congrats to the team on shipping the first release of MONAI 🥳.
You can never have enough libraries! Chips-n-Salsa is a Java library of customizable, hybridisable, iterative, parallel, stochastic, and self-adaptive local search algorithms. There’s generic algorithms, evolutionary algorithms, local search algorithms, and more algorithms! The latest release includes additional support for evolving solutions to problems whose solutions are represented with permutations. And if you didn’t know, Chips-n-Salsa is actually an acronym.
Are you tired of running Trivy and having to remember all the command prompts? Lazy Trivy is a wrapper for Trivy which runs in a Docker container and displays the results in the terminal UI. Neat! Who said software development is all about remember obscure arguments? Congrats on shipping your first major version 🥳.
One of the most popular terminal prompts around is Spaceship Prompt. It’s a modular, customisable Zsh prompt. It’s minimalist, and powerful, and now it’s faster than ever. The latest version brings a suite of changes, including new CLI, async rendering, and more. Read up on all the changes on the Spaceship blog.
🎉 Announcing Spaceship 4.0
The wait is over. We're finally ready to launch the new version of Spaceship.
🚀 Fast asynchronous rendering
📝 Sections Registry
⚙️ Customizable configuration files
💻 Command-line interface
🤭 New sections are coming— Spaceship 🚀⭐ (@SpaceshipPrompt) September 5, 2022
Want to write desktop apps with Go and web technologies? Well Wails is your answer. It’s a lightweight, fast application for quickly developing your applications. Version 2.0 brings a native application menu and dialogues, runtime API, and more. There’s also support for the popular Apple M1 chips. If you want to check out all the extensive changes, read the Wails blog.
Node.js is another popular framework and Amplication is here to help. It’s a Node.js app development tool that helps you build production ready apps without spending lots of time on repetitive code. You can continuously sync your code between GitHub and Amplication, so you’re always up to date. Congrats to the team on shipping the first major release 🥳.
Well, that’s all for this month’s top release picks. Congratulations to everyone who shipped a new release, whether it was version 1.0 or version 9.0. There’s so many amazing contributions coming from the community. Don’t forget to join in on the last few days of Hacktoberfest. If you’re getting started, check out Open Source: The Right Way who just released their 3rd edition. It goes through things to consider when contributing to open source.
Throughout Hacktoberfest and this year, there have been so many amazing community wins, and we want to continue celebrating your work. If you want to join in on the celebrations, GitHub Universe 2022 has an entire stream dedicated to the community. Grab your ticket and join us in person or online. And don’t forget, if you’re keen on open source and gaming, check out GitHub Game Off which will be starting in just a few days.
If you missed our last Release Radar, read up on the amazing community projects from August. We love featuring projects submitted by the community. If you are working on an open source project and shipping a major version soon, we’d love to hear from you. Check out our new Release Radar repository, and submit your project to be featured in the GitHub Release Radar.
How GitHub volunteers built an open source metrics dashboard for the World Health Organization and some best practices they picked up along the way.
Discover how the Ersilia Open Source Initiative accelerates drug discovery by using GitHub Actions to disseminate AI/ML models.
Git 2.46 is here with new features like pseudo-merge bitmaps, more capable credential helpers, and a new git config command. Check out our coverage on some of the highlights here.